Japanese Improvers 1

Entry Requirements

This course is aimed at students who have attended Beginners 2 or similar or have a basic knowledge of Japanese. It will introduce students to contemporary Japanese, developing all four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. 

Overview

The module will equip students with a very basic knowledge of the countries where Japanese is spoken and encourage their curiosity about the language, the country, the people, their environment, society, traditions and culture. It will enable the student to reach a level of very basic competence in the four main areas of listening, speaking, reading and writing.

The student will acquire basic language skills, to enable students to:

• Give, receive, borrow items
• Talk about colours and taste
• Talk about degree of preference
• Invite and make arrangements
• Requests and orders
• Asking permission
• Compare and contrast things
• Sports, music, film
• Family -1

Teaching and Learning 

You will be working in groups or pairs with the emphasis of the course being on participation and practice. Our aim is to develop student skills using communicative language and you will be encouraged to actively participate in class through various friendly activities designed to stimulate communication.

We recommend that you spend time between the lessons, revising and practising what has been done in class.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this module, students should be able to: 

1. Demonstrate that they can cope at basic level in face-to-face exchanges in Japanese, for example: meeting and greeting, giving personal information, introducing self and others, functioning in commonplace situations.
2. Extract specific information from short texts (i.e:literaries, newspapers, advertisements);
3. Translate specific information from short texts (i.e:literaries, newspapers, advertisements);
4. Write basic Japanese, with a basic linguistic accuracy.

Assessments

The assessment of this course is divided into four parts to assess each of the following skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing. It is designed to enhance what you have learnt during the course.

Speaking: Recording of a short speaking exercise.

Listening: Answering questions in English on a short recording, lasting no more than five minutes.

Reading: Comprehension exercise based on text such as novels, newspapers, advertisements etc.

Writing: A written task

To award credits we need to have evidence of the knowledge and skills you have gained or improved. Some of this has to be in a form that can be shown to external examiners so that we can be absolutely sure that standards are met across all courses and subjects. 

Reading Suggestions

A full reading list can be found via the following link:

 Japanese Improvers 1  

Route Progression

Students who successfully complete the module should feel that they have a good introductory command of Japanese and should be able to proceed to Improvers 2 or equivalent.

What Do I Need? 

As this is an online scheduled session course, you would need the following: 

• Internet access. 
• Access to a laptop or computer with a web camera and microphone; the use of headphones might also benefit. 
• Use of the Chrome web browser where possible.